


Rich and Strange

by CandlesInTheWell



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, Sunless Sea
Genre: Body Horror, Brotherhood, Canon-typical references to cannibalism, Gen, Memories, North, loss of self
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2019-07-23 04:51:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16151972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CandlesInTheWell/pseuds/CandlesInTheWell
Summary: A question: what is forgotten?





	Rich and Strange

**Author's Note:**

  * For [APgeeksout](https://archiveofourown.org/users/APgeeksout/gifts).



The thing that was crafted from the Navigator’s ruin is a quiet creature, patient and knowing. It has few needs, and sustenance is not among them; it knows few pleasures – not honey, not wine, not flesh. It does not sleep, but sometimes when it is alone in its cabin, drifting in the dark along the path of deep-zee currents, it dreams.

At first, what it dreamt of was only storm and zee, the wind howling down from the Avid Horizon and the course to take through razor shoals to reach safer waters. After that, the Captain’s taciturn moods and rough approximations of what the thing understands to be kindness, and later still, the curses and songs of the raucous, fearful crew. It belongs on this ship, or to it, and in that belonging it has always been content. But tonight, what it sees is a dead man standing at the prow of a ship and looking back, hand held out as if to say, _Where are you? What’s taking you so long?_ The man’s coat hangs loose about his shoulders, and his face looks like the one in mirrors, only younger, thin from starvation and different enough in the eyes and the bridge of the nose to be something other than a reflection.

The Navigator’s brother, the thing knows. There is no name attached to that knowing, but this does not strike it as unusual; deeper than the shift and flow of dark water, sharper than salt and vivid as blood spilled on the waves, it understands the pain of a name that should be there, but isn’t, because the one it belonged to was – 

Dreaming. It has been dreaming. 

It rises to its feet and walks the cabin end to end, trailing its fingers over the spines of the Navigator’s books, the skin of his charts, the wooden ribs of the sea chest where he kept his possessions. These things were bequeathed to it, and it finds contentment in them too. It likes the texture of dry parchment and the smell of ink, and though it needs no compass to set a course, it likes to watch the way the needle spins and comes to rest, pointing always in the same direction. But all that exists on the surface of a vaster, colder sea, its glassy calm disturbed now by the ripples of a thing that was but is no longer.

The sigil on the thing’s face twinges, and so do the ones written inside its chest, where the yearning has settled. Its fingers find the stitches beneath the Navigator’s fine shirt, and it touches the incision line, wondering at the emptiness inside itself. If it opened up this skin, folded it back like the pages of the journals on the desk, would there be traces left of flesh and blood? Does some scrap of the Navigator still remain?

No. All is gone. It is only this: a creature built around absence, restless, dreaming. The dream-roads were _his_ , once, like the sea-roads belonged to two brothers, the traitor and the betrayed. There is a rightness in that symmetry; the Captain, with candle-bright eyes and crimson smile, would understand.

The Captain understands many things. They sit together sometimes in the hushed dark of the Navigator’s cabin, talking by sigil-light of wind and water while the Captain picks clean the bones of deep-zee fish and the thing watches, eating nothing at all. And sometimes they speak of other secrets too, written in flesh and wax – but what the Captain knows of _that_ is not enough, and it never will be. 

The thing cannot betray, and would not if it could; the mark the Captain scribed on it is something like pain and something like love, and this ship is a home it does not want to be rid of. But captains die. It is quiet, and it is patient, and it _knows_ : men drown and gods drown, strangled by zee-wrack, pulled down by black waters. This Captain too will be taken into the silence beneath the waves – bones bleached and salt-scoured, heart and marrow gone to feed the small blind creatures that live there. There will be nothing left but what has been altered, and what was once the Navigator will be untethered then from all debt, free to follow the compass needle where it points and to find there what was lost.

That day will come. It knows this like it knows the hunger of the zee, the shattering cold of empty places, like it knows the hollow lines of a brother’s face when it lifts a hand to touch its own. 

That day will come _soon._


End file.
